Democracy and Public Service Broadcasting
REPORT
Democracy and Public Service Broadcasting
European Broadcasting Union
2023
In a world with increasing challenges to democracy and a market-driven landscape, public service broadcasters are increasingly being asked to justify their value to society.
But how can public service media’s role as a reliable and stable source of information that plays a vital role in a healthy democracy be measured? This report from the EBU attempts to answer this question and offer broadcasters a way to respond to challenges.
Business models and sustainability in the newspaper industry
JOURNAL
Business models and sustainability in the newspaper industry: Perspectives from European and North American executives
Paulo Faustino | Journal of Digital Media & Policy
2023
The digital revolution has created significant challenges to the viability of media economic models while also broadening prospects for editorial organisations and journalists. This article seeks to comprehend the viability of media business models and how media executives modify their practises to deal with digital change in a competitive market. For this article, media executives from three US newspapers (from the United States of America and Canada) and three European newspapers (from Ireland, England, and France) were interviewed. All of the newspaper firms interviewed continue to face substantial problems in their search for ways to ensure the sustainability of their business models in order to motivate their partners, shareholders, and employees while also contributing to more diversity in the information market.
How Business Can Support a Healthy Infosphere
REPORT
Investing in Facts: How the Business Community Can Support a Healthy Infosphere
Marius Dragomir | CIMA
2023
The report emphasises the relationship between the private sector and independent media and why the private sector should care about independent media. It studies three countries’ – Czechia, Romania, and Serbia – media and business sectors, and examines how efforts have been made to counter disinformation and boost independent media. The business community in all these three regions has different reasons for supporting independent media but all of them have realised that a healthy business environment can only thrive if the community is well informed. In addition, the report highlights limitations experienced by the business sector, lack of financial resources, and absence of communication between independent journalism and the private sector.
Public Service Media and Public Funding
JOURNAL
Public service media and public funding: A three-country study of willingness to pay versus perceived dispensability
Annika Sehl | European Journal of Communication
2023
This study analyses results based on an online survey in France, Germany, and the UK in regards to public service media funding. The study explores the respondents’ “willingness to pay” for PSM versus the opinion that PSM is dispensable. The study finds that although most doubted PSM’s dispensability, they also believed that if the licence was determined by them, they would pay a much smaller amount. Therefore, the study concludes it is important to understand the factors that may impede people’ willingness to pay.
Are public service media distinctive from the market?
JOURNAL
Are public service media distinctive from the market? Interpreting the political information environments of BBC and commercial news in the United Kingdom
Stephen Cushion | European Journal of Communication
2022
With many citizens having access to a variety of media, this paper questions whether public service provides a distinctive and informative news service compared to private media? It found that BBC news and commercial public service platforms mainly covered politics, public affairs and international issues, plus BBC news online covered more informative topics than the market-based media which reported more on celebrity and entertainment news. In addition, where public service media reported with a world view perspective, market-driven media reported news with a UK perspective.
Finding the funds for journalism to thrive
POLICY BRIEF
Finding the funds for journalism to thrive
Policy options to support media viability
UNESCO | Dr. Anya Schiffrin, Prof. Emily Bell, Dr. Julie Posetti & Francesca Edgerton
Published: 2022
“This brief comes as part of the UNESCO series World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development. The brief addresses how policymakers can best respond to the severe financial crisis threatening the supply of independent journalism. It provides a typology of global responses, assesses their pros and cons, and makes 22 actionable recommendations. It builds on the Windhoek+30 Declaration, which underlines media viability as a core principle of information as a public good.”
[Text sourced from UNESCO]
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
REPORT
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
The International Journal of Press/Politics | Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard
Published: 2021
Neff and Pickard’s new report provides further evidence that where public media is better funded, with secure funding and regulatory frameworks, they are “consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies”, and that citizens are more likely to engage in democratic processes. The study is based on a framework by Hallin and Mancini of North American and European media systems, and in correlation with the rankings of the 33 countries in the top two tiers of The 2019 Democracy Index (“full” and “flawed” democracies), developed by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Funding Journalism in Israel: Secrecy and Political Influence
WEBSITE
Funding Journalism in Israel: Secrecy and Political Influence
Center for Media, Data and Society | Central European University
Published: June 2020
Unusual opacity is the most salient characteristic of the media system in Israel, where the involvement of political figures in media operation raises serious concerns.
At first glance, the Israeli media market seems a diverse mix of old and new, public and commercial, cable and satellite, and increasingly dominant, if not ubiquitous, digital media. But beneath the appearance of this growing diversity, there is little pluralism…
Text sourced from CMDS | CEU
Who Finances India’s Journalism?
REPORT
Who Finances India’s Journalism?
Center for Media, Data and Society | Central European University
Published: June 2020
Commercial advertisers are the largest players in terms of funding spent in the media in India, but the state has also a significant role, financing the country’s public service broadcaster, shelling out public advertising money to commercial media and holding a monopoly over the news radio market.
The news media market in India is regionally and linguistically fragmented but ownership is concentrated within a handful of large players, more so in regional geographies. It is significant that the news business is largely run and owned by individuals (and families) with primarily non-media business interests and assets…
Text sourced from CMDS | CEU
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
JOURNAL
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Mel Bunce | Sage Journals
Published: May 2020
How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states?
We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews with journalists covering humanitarian issues, we explain how they minimized tensions between their diplomatic role and dominant norms of journalistic autonomy by drawing on three – broadly shared – legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In the first ‘exclusionary’ narrative, journalists differentiated their ‘truthful’ news reporting from the ‘false’ state ‘propaganda’ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second ‘fuzzifying’ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of ‘soft power’ as an ambivalent ‘boundary concept’, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final ‘inversion’ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater ‘operational autonomy’. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalists’ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital.